However, he said that if Mr Blair wanted everyone to come on board, the project needed to be a two-way process with the best of the public's ideas developed.
The European Union, by seeking to enforce competition and other rules, has been driving Italy to fight for its place in the wider market, but this is a two-way process: it also opens up Italy's markets to outsiders.
The real advances will come at least a decade from now, when onboard computers will negotiate, from hundreds of kilometers away, the best way for two planes to avoid each other in aprocess similar to the digital handshake between two computers sharing data on a network.
Airlines constantly tinker with the boarding process, and this time American says it has found away to cut an average of two minutes from the 40 minutes to 45 minutes that a narrowbody aircraft spends at the gate.